FSFE Newsletter – June 2014

Security is interdependent: We are all Gmail users now

You care about privacy and you are either paying an e-mail provider, or even
run your own mail server to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over your
email. You do this because you want to make sure that no big company has copies
of all of your personal email. Still, this does not prevent other companies
from getting their hands on your data. It is not enough to merely take care of
your own security, if you seek to increase your security. You have to convince
your peers to increase their security, too: like Jacob Appelbaum says, security
is interdependent.

FSF board member Benjamin Mako Hill wondered how much of his email has ended
up in the hands of companies such as Google. So he wrote a small program to go
through all his email since April 2004 (when Gmail was introduced) and analyse
it. Read
what Benjamin found out, what results
FSFE's Karsten Gerloff and Hugo Roy got when they
reproduced it, and why not try those scripts out for yourself?

Is it a torch light or a spy in your pocket?

A lot of programs that people install on their Android devices violate their
security. It is common that those programs ask users to accept non-readable
terms and conditions, once installed they might reveal where the device (and
therefore the user) currently is, and access personal data like user's address
books or text messages. A seemingly innocent app such as a torch light can thus
violate the user's privacy.

For owners of mobile devices it is important to have an app store that
exclusively provides Free Software. Since this means that the source code can
be checked by external parties other than the vendor, they can check what an
app really does, and highlight or directly remove anti-features. The result is
a repository providing software with licenses that respect the user's rights
instead of violating them.

In the last months we experienced that more and more people care about the
software on their mobile devices. Your
editor summarised what is currently happening with Free Your Android,
including promotion in Greece, updating and translation status of our F-Droid
leaflets, an interview with the F-Droid developer, and your editor
participating in an event about consumer protection in the mobile phone sphere
in the German Parliament.

Something completely different

FSFE's country team Netherlands wrote
a short text "The Importance of Free Software" (also available in Dutch) about the
relevance of Free Software and its conclusions for policy makers. The text
highlights the crucial question for our society about "who controls the
software?". "Because if we don't control the software we use, it
controls us. And whoever controls the software therefore controls us." The
text then was used to convince candidates to sign the Free Software Pact - a project run by
April and supported by many organisations, including
the FSFE.

Get active: Your experiences with programming resources for children

As the edu-team was asked for good resources to teach kids to program, Guido
Arnold thought the answer (or more a summary of the answers) might be
interesting to others as well. So he published the
summary. To improve our education website we ask you to give us feedback on
those resources. How do you like them, did you already have experience with
some of them, what was good, where did you have problems, and which resources
did we miss?

Donera

The Free Software Foundation Europe is a non-profit non-governmental
organisation. Our work is made
possible by a community of
volunteers,
Fellows and
donors. Your donations are critical to our
strength and autonomy. They enable us to continue working for Free
Software wherever necessary, and to be an independent voice.